COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 321 



tremes. She is chiefly concerned with the larger prob- 

 lems common to the whole domain of constructive 

 thought, rather than with the formal, dynamic, or ar- 

 chitectural processes of nature, and as an ostensible 

 neutral has often served as a court of appeal in religious 

 and scientific controversies. But philosophy could not 

 rightly perform her functions till the natural sciences 

 brought her to earth, and in the architectural realities 

 of a physical world provided a substantial footing for 

 her metaphysical abstractions. 



X. Rightness, as a Saving and Directing Agency in 

 Mental and Physical Action 



Thus the upbuilding of all constructive mental 

 processes, like the upbuilding of cooperative organic 

 structures, necessarily develops along definite phylo- 

 genetic lines. Like living things, they expend their 

 resources in protozoan mental wanderings, or in hap- 

 hazard trial explanations, in pursuit of profit. Find- 

 ing profit in Tightness only, they are gradually sta- 

 bilized in Tightness and oriented by directive realities, 

 as zigzaging swarm-spores are stabilized and oriented 

 to rectilinear light. Because they are saved by truth 

 and grow by the acquisition of truth, they progress on 

 converging lines toward a universal truth, with the 

 same purposes, the same increment of illuminating 

 thought, and with the same creative results. 



Thus, whatever his ethnic, or geographic origin 

 may be, or along whatever lines his mental activities 

 may specialize, man is always drawn in the same di- 

 rection, and compelled to face the same basic problems. 

 What is good and evil, right and wrong? How may 



